What new perspectives would you say are revealed in the paper? Can you sum them up?
Craig On Friday, August 16, 2013 1:50:04 AM UTC-4, Brent wrote: > > Here's a fascinating essay by Scott Aronson that is a really scientific, > operational exposition on the question of 'free will'; one which takes my > idea that if you solve the engineering problem you may solve the > philosophical problem along the way and does much more with it than I could. > > He also discusses how the entanglement of the brain with the environment > affects personal identity as in Bruno Marchal's duplication thought > experiments. > > He also discusses Stenger's idea of the source of the arrow of time > (secton 5.4) and Boltzmann brains. > > Brent > > The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine > Scott Aaronson > (Submitted on 2 Jun 2013 (v1), last revised 7 Jun 2013 (this version, v2)) > > In honor of Alan Turing's hundredth birthday, I unwisely set out some > thoughts about one of Turing's obsessions throughout his life, the question > of physics and free will. I focus relatively narrowly on a notion that I > call "Knightian freedom": a certain kind of in-principle physical > unpredictability that goes beyond probabilistic unpredictability. Other, > more metaphysical aspects of free will I regard as possibly outside the > scope of science. I examine a viewpoint, suggested independently by Carl > Hoefer, Cristi Stoica, and even Turing himself, that tries to find scope > for "freedom" in the universe's boundary conditions rather than in the > dynamical laws. Taking this viewpoint seriously leads to many interesting > conceptual problems. I investigate how far one can go toward solving those > problems, and along the way, encounter (among other things) the No-Cloning > Theorem, the measurement problem, decoherence, chaos, the arrow of time, > the holographic principle, Newcomb's paradox, Boltzmann brains, algorithmic > information theory, and the Common Prior Assumption. I also compare the > viewpoint explored here to the more radical speculations of Roger Penrose. > The result of all this is an unusual perspective on time, quantum > mechanics, and causation, of which I myself remain skeptical, but which has > several appealing features. Among other things, it suggests interesting > empirical questions in neuroscience, physics, and cosmology; and takes a > millennia-old philosophical debate into some underexplored territory. > > Comments: 85 pages (more a short book than a long essay!), 2 figures. > To appear in "The Once and Future Turing: Computing the World," a > collection edited by S. Barry Cooper and Andrew Hodges. And yes, I know > Turing is 101 by now. v2: Corrected typos > Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); General Literature (cs.GL); > History and Philosophy of Physics (physics.hist-ph) > Cite as: arXiv:1306.0159 [quant-ph] > (or arXiv:1306.0159v2 [quant-ph] for this version) > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
